The first time Reuters photo department got into trouble, in Lebanon in 2006, they ran photoshopped pictures from an Arab photographer (Adnan Hajj) which emphasized the violence.

This time, they cropped photos provided by Turkish media (the high-circulation weekly Hürriet), to remove traces of violence. See Elder of Zion and CAMERA for analyses (LGF seems to be down).

That doesn’t seem consistent, until you consider the context.

In the case of Adnan, the photocopying emphasized Israeli violence against Arab victims. That kind of image raised no red flags in a MSNM office (Reuters Photography) that framed the conflict as Israeli Goliath vs. Palestinian David. They were receiving a flood of such photos and passing on the best, of which Hajj’s photo of the Beirut skyline covered in plumes of smoke was a good one among many.

On the other hand, here, we have something else. The Turkish journal published these photos because they, and their Turkish audience, are proud of the damage they inflicted: from their point of view, this photo is embarrassing to the Israelis. Just like the Egyptians have a museum to their (brief moment of) victory in 1973 (October 6), so too the Turks now have a moment where they had the upper hand on Israeli soldiers. In a tribal warrior honor-shame culture, these photos are the equivalent of counting coup.

Of course, oops, that was supposed to be a peace-activist flotilla, with nothing but love for the whole world. As the NYT (Isabel Kershner) reported:

“Our volunteers were not trained military personnel,” said Yavuz Dede, deputy director of the organization. “They were civilians trying to get aid to Gaza. There were artists, intellectuals and journalists among them. Such an offensive cannot be explained by any terms.”

And indeed, the worldwide indignation over Israel’s killing the nine on board depends on this story. If they were a bunch of bloodthirsty, street-fighting Jihadis, armed for close quarter combat, then the story doesn’t quite work.

So what does Reuters do with a picture like this?

It crops out the blood and the knife in the right margin, so it sends out this:

And here’s what it cropped from the right margin:

Note that nothing is cropped from the left side of the picture. Elder of Ziyon notes that the cropped out knife is actually evidence of a) the presence not of kitchen knives but of combat knives on board, which don’t appear among the knives recovered by the IDF, hence b) the probability that the Jihadis threw some of their weapons overboard.

It certainly seems to the pro-Israel crowd that this launders the pictures for a Western liberal audience who still need to believe their (the MSNM’s) narrative about “humanitarian” “human rights” NGOs going to save a desperate people.

That’s a very interesting way to crop the photo. Most people would consider that knife an important part of the context. There was a huge controversy over whether the activists were armed. Cropping out a knife, in a picture showing a soldier who’s apparently been stabbed, seems like a very odd editorial decision.

Reuter’s response to those who inquired about the problem?

The images in question were made available in Istanbul, and following normal editorial practice were prepared for dissemination which included cropping at the edges [sic]. When we realized that a dagger was inadvertently cropped from the images, Reuters immediately moved the original set as well.

So it’s purely an innocent oversight. As soon as it was pointed out, Reuters fixed the problem. Nothing going on here.

And it gets worse. I took the photo into Photoshop and increased the exposure to lighten the dark areas, and discovered that they didn’t just crop out the knife and blood — they also cropped out another badly injured Israeli soldier lying on the floor.

Honest Reporting has posted on this and asked David Katz to comment. After not wanting to jump to conclusions, and examining the evidence, including Johnson’s analysis, he concludes:

It is crystal clear that someone at Reuters has deliberately hidden key parts of the original images. What we do not know at this stage is, who at Reuters did this and more importantly why?

The use of imagery in the media war is becoming more and more widespread. There has to be a responsibility from the bloggers, website hosts and especially from the international news wire services in the way they use the images.

This appears to be a deliberate attempt to change images for a specific reason. Reuters needs to investigate this and act in an appropriate manner

56 Responses to Reutersgate 2.0: Honor-Shame vs. Liberal MSNM

You are misreading the incident. Reuters not only ran the pictures but gave it big play as a slideshow on its website, which can only mean it was prepared to report that violence was indeed instigated against Israeli commandos. There would certainly be no point to running the pictures and giving them great prominence if Reuters had an agenda of promoting an image of the flotilla’s peaceful intentions. With or without the knife, the pictures are quite explicit and the accompaying captions clarify what the photos portray without any waffling. The allegation about the cropping is not valid. By cropping equally from the right and left, the photo editor would have cut off part of the soldier’s body, making the picture less dramatic and removing part of the main element.

On the other hand, you are quite right in syaing that the incident dramatically points up the cognitive dissonance between the leftwing European activists and the Islamic thugs they chose to ally with. The activists have the best intentions in their own way, but are so befogged by their Third World romanticism and guilt that they can’t see for what cause they are really working, namely that they aren’t engaged in the good fight for human rights but enmeshing themselves in a tribal struggle. Hence their “allies” go out of their way to publish scenes of gruesome violence to demonstrate their heroism against the enemy, undercutting the Europeans’ case that the flotilla had non-violent intentions. This time, the Europeans can’t even blame Israel for “manipulating” the images.

They managed to get the act cancelled. Two of the israeli green energy speakers had to be protected by the police as they were leaving the building, one of them was hitted by a stone, and once inside the car…this is what happened.

As a spanish, as an european, as a western citizen, I feel deeply embarrased.

As I see them painting the svastika in the window of the car, I cant stop thinking “come on…really?…again?”

The saddest thing is they dont even see how antisemitic this is. They dont see the irony. Looks like black comedy, but it is painfuly real.

The hands of the police were tied. The president of the University is leftist and the police cant do anything in the campus unless he allows. None of those who attacked the police car will be punished. None of them will have to pay a dime for the broken glasses. Had the police tried to hit one of the demonstrators, I am sure he would be in trouble right now.

It struck me as similar to saying one thing in Arabic and another in English for Western consumption. The difference here is that that the Westerners – Reuters – – the MSNM – the principled peace activists and journalists like Enderalin – all know exactly what to do just like they were working for the….er….enemy – to be a bit prickly about it. It reminds me of the idea that those the Gods wish to destroy they first make crazy. In other words I think we are seeing a mass or collective act of self destruction. Not suicide because suicide is conscious. But collectives rise and decline – sometimes precipitously and I think sometimes the barbarians get more credit than they deserve. We are seeing a civilization – the West, not just Israel – turn on itself. For example turning the positive quality of self criticism into self doubt, self loathing and self sabotage. I’d say we are bit like the soldiers of Alexander the Great who lost confidence the further they got from home. That is, the West has gotten further materially by a long way than any previous civilization, but that very success has made us so soft we have lost the will to defend ourselves. So here we are using that marvel of technological accomplishment – Photoshop – to hide evidence of naked aggression against us. My intuition is that there is a built in human instinct to self limit and that we are seeing this instinct running out of control in the Western collective just now.

I tend to be optimistic so watching this tragedy unfold is a good tonic for my optimism. At the same time there may be relatively invisible positive things happening – like Augean Stables – that will act as a corrective to the lemming like behavior of some of our fellow Westerners. And then there are the Rumsfeldian ‘unknowns unknowns’ which may be either positive or negative. Makes life and geo-politics a bit of a gamble. :-)

Israel must send Turkey a clear message that if Turkish warships are sent to accompany the next flotilla trying to break the embargo on Gaza, these will be considered acts of war by Israel , Uzi Dayan, former deputy Chief of General Staff, told Army Radio Monday morning.

“If the Turkish prime minister joins such a flotilla,” Dayan said, “we should make clear beforehand this would be an act of war, and we would not try to take over the ship he was on, but would sink it.”

“If Israel doesn’t make this clear beforehand, the Turks will grow increasingly self-assured, and we may indeed find ourselves facing such a scenario, which could have been averted.”

I don’t want to defend Reuters here, but the photo composition is just awful. I don’t think anyone was looking in the viewfinder when this was shot. The strange orientation and large areas of darkness makes it almost unintelligible.

So I advance the possibility — though not probability — that the cropping decision was made innocently to render the photo more intelligible to the reader, by eliminating distracting details around the edges and drawing the eye to the central figure on the ground.

That said, these images are so poor that one wonders why they were published at all. They tell us nothing that we don’t already know. Israeli sailors were beaten bloody and repeatedly stabbed by the “humanitarians.” In this case, a picture hardly paints a dozen words. It wasn’t necessary.

Diane, they were published by the Turks to show how proud they are that a mob of only 50 armed thugs managed to drag four soldiers below the decks of the ship. They were cropped by Reuters (two photos were cropped to remove the knife) to make it more palatable for liberals in the west. But they shouldn’t have bothered. The nytimes took 5 days to show the video of the Israelis getting clubbed and stabbed on their website, and they sure as hell won’t bother publishing these Reuters photos.

So I advance the possibility — though not probability — that the cropping decision was made innocently to render the photo more intelligible to the reader, by eliminating distracting details around the edges and drawing the eye to the central figure on the ground.

Distracting indeed. But not from the soldier. It’s the sort of thing that facilitated the BBC claiming that the jihadists “wanted to show that they gave medical care to the soldiers even while being attacked”.
Understandable.

Yes, incog, it’s part of my survival kit.

The jews who upon being pushed into the gas chambers still believed they were going to shower, and that indeed helped them survive all the train travel to the camps. Until that point.

Very few people realize how much anti-semitism is “hidden” in the population at large and will come out of the woodwork in the proper context.

I don’t think it’s just anti-Semitic slurs that gets a pass. I think anti-male, anti-white, anti-conservative and anti-American slurs also get a pass in our culture. Certain groups (blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, gays, the poor, feminists, Palestinians) enjoy special status that bars their ever being legitimate targets of criticism. Other groups have special status that make it perpetually open season on criticizing them. Jews lead that group, but they hardly have a monopoly. Consider the status of conservative women, for example. They are always, without exception, wrong, evil, stupid, gender-traitors, etc. It would be interesting to compile a list of “open season” groups in the popular imagination. Bankers and oil executives definitely belong on the list. So do attorneys.

Our open-minded culture is very closed-minded about certain groups-non-grata.

Now they’re caught cropping photos from the Gaza Flotilla to remove the knives held by the “activists” and the pools of blood caused by them. See LGF: Did Reuters Crop a Photo to Remove a Peace Activist’s Weapon? and Another……

In some way you’re right.
The Turkish publication stressed aspects that were important to some of their readership, whereas the Reuters one had a slightly different optic.

The Turkish publication is about the humiliation/shame brought upon the all powerful IDF by “glorious militants”. The same newspaper also published the story of some militants boasting about the captured Israeli kids and the fright in their eyes… It has the male honour code spilled all over.

Reuters apparently didn’t “get” that message. For them, the story is about Israeli soldiers mistreated (or duly resisted by humanitarian activists that were justifiably angered/frustrated by the abortion of their mission). And in their eyes, humanitarian activists are not those oriental males; they are characterised by a more “effeminate” i.e., passive or defensive attitude. The Reuters narrative is about struggle, frustration, weakness.

Neither of us can tell which death feels better or worse, that of the optimistic/skeptic or that of the pessimist/realist.

I go by my family strategy, it worked at least once (for each of my parents). And on one part, it goes back a millennium ago. It’s an attitude, not a logical construction (it can be reconstructed post hoc, but I’m familiar with the hindsight bias). You can criticise or mock it as much as you wish, we’ll discuss it on the Heavenly internet — yet another contribution of the dead Juice to the world: the next one. OK?

“On the other hand, here, we have something else. The Turkish journal published these photos because they, and their Turkish audience, are proud of the damage they inflicted: from their point of view, this photo is embarrassing to the Israelis.”

The Turkish journal Hurriyet? They are proud of this? Hurriyet? Likely to the contrary, they used it to show these people were not peaceful.

@Ingognito
I completely agree with you about not letting what I wish was true cloud my view of what is true. I certainly don’t always succeed but I am getting better.

The concept of unknown unknowns has nothing to do with what Rumsfeld accomplished or didn’t. I think they are a useful and often ignored factor in the calculus of realism.

I don’t know what you base your opinion of Rumsfeld on, but I would recommend Doug Feith’s War and Decision. The greatest recommendation I could give it is that neither the Times nor the Wapo reviewed it. As a media savvy Augean Stable reader you will understand that ignoring Feith’s book is another case of cropping out the inconvenient. Welcome to the Matrix.

The Styen article penetrates. I have never read about the simple demographic facts behind Turkey’s return to ‘conventional Islamic imperialism’. So I now understand why a resurgence of the Kemalists isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

The concept of unknown unknowns has nothing to do with what Rumsfeld accomplished or didn’t. I think they are a useful and often ignored factor in the calculus of realism.

The statement that “there are unknown unknowns” doesn’t seem to me to be such a revelation to anybody with a modicum of intellect; and being aware of their existence doesn’t generally help much because of their very nature.

I don’t know what you base your opinion of Rumsfeld on, but I would recommend Doug Feith’s War and Decision.

Well, I am sorry but I have already expressed my opinion on Iraq a long time ago: from the get go I thought it was a strategic blunder which was going to exacerbate american collapse. Not only because of the futile waste, but because it was initially implemented with such incompetence and ignorance that defies reason.

In effect it is a major factor for which the US is paralyzed from dealing with the post-american chaos created by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and now Turkey. Ditto for Afghanistan. So what Feith, or Rumsfeld, or Bush or whoever writes or says about it is entirely irrelevant. I reiterate: wait until the US leaves and see what happens.

The real problem with the Iraq war was that a lot was known and predicted and was ignored. Rumsfeld then tried to get out of the crap he created by implying that he couldn’t have known what he ignored.

There were Turkish special service representatives on “Mavi Marmara” aid ship heading for Gaza Strip May 31, Greek Cypriot European Parliament MP Eleni Theocharous said, Turkish Firat reported, quoting the Greek sources which said Turkey pretends to be a defender of the international law while it itself doesn’t show any respect for the law. Turkey has occupied Cyprus, violates Greece air space, is responsible for the Armenian genocide and fires Kurdish villages, etc.

@incognito
Dealing with you is becoming like dealing with a cop who just had a fight with his wife. I seem to be getting exasperation and determination to argue no matter what. Since I actually agree with most of what you say in comments, even someone with my modicum of intelligence can see that it is better to just read them.

By now the reputation of bankers for wisdom and probity has sunk lower even that that of journalists.
…………..
The article in the Guardian was therefore an exercise, not untypical of the genre, in scapegoating, that disregarded both the most obvious considerations and the deeper currents. In days gone by, it would have been the Jewish money-lenders who would have been blamed; to blame the banks seems so much more acceptable, generous, and liberal-minded, but the structure of the thought is similar.

Reuters apparently didn’t “get” that message. For them, the story is about Israeli soldiers mistreated (or duly resisted by humanitarian activists that were justifiably angered/frustrated by the abortion of their mission).

Maybe Reuters got Schadenfreude?
I doubt very much that those who are Reuters were worried about “mistreatment”.
They are constantly trying to shove Israeli noses into the muck. In a similar way Hamas is playing with Shalit’s family and friends by increasing the distress.

I’m going on observation now, but have you never observed the thrill some people get in changing a picture?
From the silly one of putting a mustache on a fair lady, for example, to the honour/shame extreme, where the “fair humanitarian activist” without a knife in the world overcomes … as opposed to the “dark thug” with a care in the world.

The underlying thrill would be to present the hated one in a posture of distress and torment without disclosing the complete lie which would tend to distract.

In days gone by, it would have been the Jewish money-lenders who would have been blamed; to blame the banks seems so much more acceptable, generous, and liberal-minded, but the structure of the thought is similar.

I happen to be reading DO AS I SAY on the utter hypocrisy of lefties such as Moore, Nader, Pelosi, Soros, Clintons. I strongly recommend it.

It so happens that Soros has triggered some anti-semite attacks from the likes of Malaysia’s asshole Mahathir.

That’s interesting because there is nobody more anti-semitic than Soros, who escaped during the war by helping confiscate the property of exterminated jews and called it “the happiest days of my life”.

They are constantly trying to shove Israeli noses into the muck. In a similar way Hamas is playing with Shalit’s family and friends by increasing the distress.

That’s what sells these days. Like Helen Thomas, it’s not just them doing it that’s significant, but that they not only get away with it, but even when they caught nothing happens and some question those who expose them.

The Turkish journal Hurriyet? They are proud of this? Hurriyet? Likely to the contrary, they used it to show these people were not peaceful.

I haven’t spend much time on it, but I disagree. Didn’t Hurriyet claim that Israel deleted those images so that the world wouldn’t see them? Why? So that the world wouldn’t see the lack of peacefulness of these Turkish Jihadists?

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